“Night” by Elie Wiesel – Unraveling the Holocaust

Even though by some standards seventy years is a fair amount of time, in terms of human history it is but a split second. It feels distant, but we must never forget that the Holocaust is something that happened very recently, and it’s something which can certainly happen again; after all, it’s not as if every single person came to suddenly accept peace and love as their primary values once the Nuremberg trials happened.

I believe it is necessary to remember what happened, study it and understand why it happened, so that one day we may prevent such a heinous and indescribable tragedy. A good place to start doing that would be, in my opinion, the acclaimed Night by Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel is himself a Holocaust survivor who has the distinction to have been held prisoner in numerous camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Buna. In short, Night is an autobiographical account of what he remembers from the beginning to the end of his Holocaust.

We get to see from his “insider’s” perspective on how the Jewish people were little by little increasingly oppressed, how the ghettos came to be, how eventually their deportation by the trainload became normal and expected. He takes us inside him with the camps, detailing with simple and yet powerful words the countless atrocities committed to him as well as the others there.

Naturally, Wiesel goes far beyond offering a recollection of facts, though he could have certainly stopped there and called it a day. He goes beneath the surface and attempts to examine the mindsets of the people who were around him. He tries to understand, rationalize and find meaning in the things that happened, when it comes to both specific things and the big picture itself.

He gives serious consideration to numerous questions which arose after the genocide was over with, such as its meaning for the world, its implications in regards to human nature, why the prisoners did not fight back on a large scale despite having the numbers for it, just to name a few.

I think that the stylistic approach used by Wiesel helps to make this book greater than the sum of its parts. He approaches everything with a bit of an impersonal, detached, colder and calculated perspective.

He doesn’t really get caught up in the intensity of the emotions, rather trying to provide a perspective as unbiased as possible, helping us to see the truth about what happened in all of its nakedness, rather than the truth he saw (though the two surely weren’t too far off from each other).

Everything taken into consideration, Night is probably one of the most important books written in the last century, a grim reminder of man’s capacity for being inhuman to humanity itself.

The Holocaust may very well be one of the biggest, if not the biggest “mistake” (for lack of a better word) committed by us, and it is our duty, whether or not we have a personal connection to these events, to ensure such atrocities never see the light of day again.

If you are interested in learning about the Holocaust in all of its aspects from the first person point of view of a real survivor, then you can’t afford to miss out on this chef-d’oeuvre.

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Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 - July 2, 2016) Personal site Elie Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish-American author, political activist and professor. He is a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald. He has written over 50 books in total, most of them touch on the subject of Nazism in one way or another, with the most widely-acclaimed one being Night.